A good spell for event driven hedge funds such as FrontFour Capital
David Lorber

FrontFour Capital Partners LLC has made appearances in Opalesque's daily newsletter (AMB)'s Activist News section for a while. The last we heard of the hedge fund was when it was going through a battle with the board of Sensient Technologies Corp., a publicly traded producer of food flavorings and colors, as it was biding to get four director seats. Before that, last year, the fund asked shareholders of Ferro Corp., which supplies electronics material, to appoint new management. The year before that, FrontFour resigned from the board of Fisher Communications, where it had two directors. Eventful, as any activist fund would be.

Actually the fund, FrontFour Capital Partners LP, is not a purely activist fund. It is a value event driven fund, with a focus on North America and a fundamental approach to research, which looks for specific catalysts or events that can unlock value. Incepted in January 2007, the $400m long/short fund has annualized 10% since then and 23% since 2009, according to online fund databases. It has returned 102% since inception compared to 20% for the HFRX Event Driven index. Furthermore, it holds the 41st position in Barron's latest Best 100 Hedge Funds ranking (May 2014) and was a winner at the latest Global Emerging Manager Award ceremony, in the Event Driven category.

In the mean time, the HFRI Event-Driven (Total) Index, while being flat in April and up 2% YTD, is up 9.5% for the last 12 months (the Activist Index is up 9.6% and the Composite Index 5.4% for the last 12 months). According to Preqin, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, BarclayHedge, event driven funds are among the best performers at the moment.

Co-founders David Lorber, Stephen Loukas and Zachary George run FrontFour.......................